>> tail -f on logfiles is coredumping.
>> (The problem seems to be related to tail's tendency to read the file
>> via mmap().)
> Is this over NFS?
No; all filesystems involved are local UFS/FFS disk.
> The way I usually build the world is to nohup and background the
> make, then tail -f the log file sometimes from multiple terminals at
> once...
Since I sent that message I have been experimenting, trying to
deliberately reproduce the problem. I have been unable to reproduce
exactly that problem, but I do have something very similar.
# cd /usr/src
# ( make && make depend ) >& somelogfile &
# tail -f somelogfile
then, from another window while the tail -f is running,
# vi somelogfile
vi sees the file _size_ correctly, but the _contents_ are as of the
time tail -f started, with NULs replacing everything past that. (This
is entirely on UFS, er, FFS filesystems.)
This is on NetBSD/sun3. I have not succeeded in making it happen on
NetBSD/sparc, though I have not tried very hard yet. But almost all of
the VM code is non-machine-specific, so I'm not sure why this should
make any difference.
I am now thinking about turning on vpagerdebug and provoking trouble,
to see what's actually going wrong....
der Mouse
mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu